Frank commentary from an unretired call girl

Overdue

When I was an undergrad, I came up with a model for how cultures develop over time. It was divided into four stages:

Barbarism: All substance, little form. Barbaric cultures have youth, vigor, drive and often a lot of good ideas; they just haven’t learned to apply them to best effect yet. Barbaric cultures often borrow or steal ideas from older cultures, as the young Romans borrowed Greek mythology and the young US borrowed from England and Rome.

Civilization: Form and substance in balance. Civilized cultures are mature, but still strong, and have developed institutions, systems and mores that reflect their values and ideas. History often speaks of this period as the “Golden Age” of a culture, the period of its greatest accomplishments.

Decadence: All form, waning substance. Decadent cultures have outlived their youth and vigor, and are obsessed with their own past greatness. They look down on other cultures and are often xenophobic, focusing on elaborate rituals and worship-words which no longer have any meaning.

Decay: Corrupt form, no substance. Decaying cultures are those which have completely lost their way; they mistake their institutions and procedures for the ideals they were created to further, which a decaying culture no longer remembers. These cultures may collapse or be conquered, but sometimes go on decaying for many centuries before that happens.

…someone at CNN actually seems to believe, and undoubtedly many people agree, that the most salient point of the controversy was Trump’s language, that he had uttered taboo words which would presumably ritually pollute the dainty hearing of anyone viewing the video. The fact that he used these common words about women is presented as though that somehow makes it worse than if he had used similar words in talking about men, children, mixed groups of people or Shetland ponies; the assumption seems to be that women are delicate china dolls who are magically harmed when men emit certain sounds from their vocal apparatus, even if the woman in question did not even hear them. If he had joked about violating the physical boundaries of women without using those words, perhaps saying “I attempted to get her in bed” and “grab their crotches” instead, would that have made it all better in the minds of this unknown CNN editor and others like her? Because that’s certainly the implication…

Now this week, we’re faced with a one-two punch from the New York Times which leaves little doubt that we live in a culture obsessed with forms and uninterested in substance. First, the Times lavishly praised and obsequiously fawned on the sister of a murderous dictator, a monstrously evil woman with an important role in her brother’s totalitarian regime, a person who has herself ordered and directed literal mass enslavement and actual “human trafficking”…because she gave a dirty look to a US politician Times editors don’t like. So now we know the secret, ladies. Do honest work making people feel good? The Times will say you’re a “victim” and a “slave”. Literally enslave and “traffic” people? The Times will admire you and call you a “diplomat”. And how would the Times (not to mention actual human rights organization “officials”) react to another murderous dictator ordering that women be sexually maimed? Why, by complaining that he didn’t give those orders in nicer language, naturally:

President Rodrigo Duterte, the Philippine strongman who has earned a reputation for dirty tactics and language, was criticized…for having boasted that he had ordered soldiers to shoot female communist guerrillas in the genitals…the president said in a speech…“We will not kill you. We will just shoot you in the vagina”…the criticism of his choice of words has been fierce. It “is just the latest in a series of misogynist, derogatory and demeaning statements he has made about women,” said Carlos H. Conde, the Philippines researcher for Human Rights Watch…This is not the first time Mr. Duterte had been criticized for crude remarks about women…

Presumably, if Duterte had ordered rebels be maimed in a genteel way, and he gave some Republican a dirty look while doing so, the Times and all its allied talking heads (not to mention the legions of marching morons who take their cues from such pompous ninnies) would be perfectly OK with that. A society more concerned with words and pictures, which talks about “porn as a health crisis” while its cops are actually shooting people down in the street and torturing them to death in cages, and worries more about politicians’ language and manners than the fact that they are murdering their own people by the thousands, is long overdue for collapse.

Setting aside that Nina Burliegh rpiied off ELB’s concept without any attribution, (it is Newsweek after all) she goes on to associate sex trafficking and the sexual harassment (#MeToo Movement ) with a series of very selective emails that she finds offensive.

Never mind that there was no actual human trafficking or sexual harassment involved in any of these cases. It’s enough that Nin finds the emails so upsetting that to her these men are a greater risk to sex workers than the men law enforcement she holds unaccountable and thereby panders too. Men who who commit actual rape and human trafficking against these women, but apparently didn’t send any emails that give her the vapors.

The cops who rape and murder sex workers must feel good to know that Nina’s got their back.

I agree with the other two commenters that we’re definitely in the Decay stage.

The interaction between the Sister Kim and Pence and the media (and by extension, the public) interpretation makes me shake my head. They’re both people who hold some horrible beliefs and support human rights abuses. I’m sure if they got past the whole, “You, Evil American” and “You, Evil North Korean” thing, they’d share tips on how to better oppress ones LGBTQ+ populations, for example.

Y’all will have to forgive me for these very short synopses, which have misled y’all as to the seriousness of the decrepitude required to hit the “Decay” stage. The US is definitely not there; it is still a clear and present danger to other countries and to its own citizens. No country which can still bully others, terrorize its own populace and force compliance from pretty much anyone it likes is in decay. A decaying country has essentially no power; it cannot stop marauding bandit armies from crossing its borders, and its provinces farthest from the capital usually function as separate countries. Most cultures never reach decay; they collapse or are conquered sometime in the decadence period.

Depending on when you start counting decadence, and when you find final decay, collapse, or being conquered, Rome declined and fell for about 300 to 500 years. The USA has existed for far fewer years than the shortest estimate of Rome’s decline and fall from the civilization stage.

I enjoy your blog, but I’m pretty sure you didn’t come up with the idea of civilizations going from barbarism to civilization to decadence. I first encountered that quote in a book by George Friedman, and I knew he was referencing something else. It gets mis-attributed to Oscar Wilde, but unless you’re an unnamed French journalist from before the turn of the century (not this one), I don’t think you can take credit.

Ah, yes. Every smart person looking at history will eventually come up with a similar model. (Not criticizing, for an undergrad this is a pretty nice achievement.) Which is a good indicator as to its accuracy.

Unfortunately, it is not only the US being in active transition to the last phase, most of the western world and some of the rest are there too or are only a bit behind: Image is everything – facts are nothing. It does not matter what you do, it matters how you do it. People are revered and put into power for things that are not accomplishments. People vote themselves bread and games. Everybody is dead set on not actually seeing what is. And so on.

As this totally kills any form of actual leadership and meritocracy, it eventually kills a society by massive increase of inefficiency, corruption and outright waste.

Trump’s comments on the tour bus are taken completely amiss. What Trump said is that women treat you very, very differently when you are rich and famous. “When you’re a star they let you do it, You can do anything.”

What so outrages the PC brigade is that everyone knows that it’s perfectly true,and that Trump of all people would know.

As to stages of civilisation, there’s an interesting theory about that civilisation directly correlates with enforcing female sexual continence. Quite a bit of data supporting the thesis.

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